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Notes -
Slow news week. The current thing is still Graham Platner.
NYT: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior
That's right, the New York Times hunted down as many of Platner's ex-girlfriends as they could to dig up dirt on this guy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire article is irrelevant high school-tier personal gossip, but gee there sure is a lot of irrelevent personal gossip. The one anecdote with teeth comes from a woman active in Republican politics.
There are a lot of ways one could interpret those paragraphs.
Ladies, never ask your man what he would do to a home invader. Unless you're into that.
This article confirms my earlier suspicion that Platner is getting the kind of hostile media coverage usually reserved for Republicans. The elephant in the room is that this is because Platner likes Nazi imagery (it is beyond serious dispute at this point that he knew for years it was a totenkopf) and dislikes the state of Israel. I am 90% sure that both of the authors are Jewish. It feels icky to break out the calipers for this (though I am not basing my assessment solely on their names and faces. I was able to find old articles linking them to synagogues), but I really do think it is relevant.
I gotta say, this Platner guy is proving his enlisted status more every day. What is it I always say? Gayest pack of straight dudes in the world. The politics of this aside, this is what happens when the left (or anyone) finds a legitimate enlisted combat vet to run for them. They're going to have these "skeletons", because these skeletons are just class markers from very distant classes. Yes of course they have politically incorrect views, because political correctness is a class thing between the middle and upper-middle classes. The actual combat troops are the ragged lower edge of the working classes/upper criminal classes usually, or in Platner's case, the downwardly mobile scion of middle class parents.
You can see it in his life. He grew up relatively well-off but provincial. His parents sent him to the good schools, but he went into the military during a war, and specifically into the parts of the military that do the actual fighting. After that he did low-grade mercenary work overseas. This is a guy who could have had any job in the military, could have been an officer. He was in it for the love of the game. Of course he has a temper, of course he has a messy personal life. Of course he's an underachiever in civilian life, until recently at least. Of course he has edgelord ink and wild political views (to middle class civilians). You can't get an authentic soldier without some combination of a lot of that.
In fact, aside from the political valence, it's a pretty similar story to my own.
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
[Kipling, 1892]
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